Truth is Fiction or is it?
Masayuki Amagai, Vice President of Keio University:
In this age of excess, truth and fiction are intermingled. Truth tends to be complex and challenging to grasp, while fiction is often simple and easy to understand. Moreover, truth can be painful, whereas fiction is comforting. Communicating truth requires significant effort and resources, while fiction can be created effortlessly inside a single person’s mind, at little to no cost. As a result, fiction spreads far more easily. And what drives this dissemination is no longer people, but AI-powered algorithms. These algorithms are developing at an extraordinary speed, making it increasingly difficult to predict their impact on humanity.
I listened too one of the episodes where Craig Mod was available and these were his words. Gist is quite similar.
“World is getting to this level of complexity where one to one direct relationship between action and output is so abstract that you need to develop this rigor of investigation (lot of people don’t have) of why this is happening in the world right now? Conspiracy theories are so seductive is because they reduce complexities. That fact that world is this crazy spider web of things, if you pluck a string over here, it’s gonna resonate in weird ways in the other side of the world. To follow those threads out, it requires commitment and intellectual curiosity which is often lost in YouTube or Twitter.”
https://x.com/paubhavyang/status/1381477372528971778?s=61